


Dreaming Underground

by shootingstarcipher



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, M/M, Mental Instability, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-01 00:55:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12145047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcipher/pseuds/shootingstarcipher
Summary: You’d think I was crazy if I told you.And he would have. It was a stupid idea really, and the fact that he was still desperately searching for something he’d lost years and years ago would have made Richie laugh even harder at him. So he kept his mouth shut until he couldn’t hold it in anymore.





	1. Tears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And if they had all left him to die, the worst part was that not a single one of them had decided to come back for him – not even Richie.

At least that stupid clown wasn’t there anymore.

But that begged the question, where had it gone? It didn’t seem to still be in the house with him, but how could he know for sure? And even though it wasn’t in the room with him, he still didn’t feel safe. How could he? - hearing the manic laughter of some insane, malevolent monster resonating from deep within his skull, and while the voice that ever so sweetly commanded him to take the pills that were no longer where they were supposed to be was suffocating him from inside his own head. Pennywise may not have been there in a physical sense, but he was still haunting Eddie’s mind.

Even curling up in a ball and pretending none of it was happening was difficult, the agony in his arm making even the smallest movements into trying tasks. Feeling his breathing becoming increasingly shallow at the thought, he reached up with his uninjured arm and breathed into his inhaler, thankful that he’d managed to hold onto it during the struggle (unfortunately the same could not be said for his medication, which Pennywise had personally thrown out of a first-floor window and which he would not be scrabbling around in a pile of rubbish for; he’d just have to get his hands on some new ones – if he ever managed to get out of the house).

He hadn’t heard screams or shouts for quite some time (and in fact the last ones he’d heard were his own) leading him to believe that there were only two real possibilities as to what had happened to his friends since he’d gotten trapped there: the first being that they’d simply abandoned him to save themselves and the second being that they were all dead – murdered at the hands of the monster that had trapped him there. He wasn’t sure which one was worse. This realisation prompted him to breathe into his inhaler once more.

And if they had all left him to die, the worst part was that not a single one of them had decided to come back for him – not even Richie. 

The floor he was lying on was utterly repulsive and he wanted his pills now more than ever but it was hopeless. They were all gone. Just like his friends, it seemed.

But he did have one last thing that never failed to give him hope. Keeping his broken arm resting on his chest he dug his free hand into his pocket and took out something he’d never let anyone else see. In his hand was the scrappy remains of a bracelet he’d been given as a young child – around six years old – and never went anywhere without, though he had lost it for a while a few years back, which was how it ended up with missing beads and frayed threads.

He held it in his hand for a short while, rubbing his thumb across the beads and playing with the black and yellow threads – that had, he was certain, once been different colours altogether. To his dismay, along with the hope it always gave him, this time came sorrow as his mind wandered back to how he’d been left in the house of a monstrous being alone, with no way to escape or even defend himself against an attack. And without his pills to give him strength, he felt weaker and more helpless than he ever had done before.

That’s when the tears started threatening to fall and with each passing moment – and with every longing thought of his friends, and one in particular, who had still not returned to him – they grew closer and closer to carrying out the deed. Though he wouldn’t have been inclined to admit it to anyone else, he had already cried that day. Of course he had. And his so-called fragility was well known to everyone who’d ever met him, but nobody else needed to know just how weak he felt. 

It knew. And Eddie was well aware of that fact. 

While it may have also brought him an overpowering feeling of self-hatred and despair, the bedraggled old bracelet that was missing most of its beads but had never lost its memories had done its job, filling him with a sense of determination that was just enough to get him to momentarily block out the pain and stand up off the dirty grey floor. There had to be a way out and if no-one else was going to show it to him, Eddie didn’t have a choice; he had to get out of there.

Except that before he could take a single step, an unseen force hit him like a ton of bricks on the back of his head, knocking him to the floor once again. This time, he didn’t get back up.

 

It felt like a dream. God only knew how long he’d been out for, but once he came around, it suddenly didn’t matter that he was in more pain now than he had been before, that the shattered bones in his arm wouldn’t stop reminding him of their condition for a single second, or that the room Niebolt House seemed to have melted away around him and that an even dirtier, more sickening environment had appeared in its place.

None of that mattered because Richie was there, standing just a metre or so in front of him. 

And because of that, it took Eddie a while to realise he was lying on his back in a sewer, covered in God knows what. It was all so repulsive that he heard his mother’s voice yelling at him from inside his head again, reminding him of how sick he was – something he’d never be able to forget – and his lungs started to constrict inside his chest, his heart hammering away against his ribcage like it was trying to break through the bones. He instinctively felt around for his inhaler, only to find that it wasn’t where he’d left it.

Anxiously glancing up at Richie with eyes brimming with tears and desperation, he caught a glimpse of his inhaler lying in waste by Richie’s feet. The look on his friend’s face was incomprehensible – his eyes oozed concern, but he didn’t seem to be as worried for him as he usually would be, and yet his lips were curling into a smile that seemed almost sinister, like he was enjoying his friend’s distress. Richie was weird (there was no denying that) but this wasn’t like him at all.

Eddie’s suspicions only intensified when he watched his grinning friend raise a foot and crush his inhaler right in front of him a moment later.

Eddie’s heart immediately sank, his eyes widening as he became the personification of shock and horror. But he didn’t scream. His voice was too hoarse, his throat too sore from all the crying and screaming he’d already done that day to make another sound – and besides, Richie was still Richie, no matter how strangely he was behaving; he must have had explanation for his actions, even if he didn’t understand it straight away. That was just something you got used to when you were friends with someone like Richie Tozier for so long.

His thoughts were almost instantly distracted from the fragments of his demolished inhaler scattered amongst the repulsive water of the sewer when his friend darted closer to him without warning, offering his hand and helping him up. Wincing at the pain in his broken arm, his bones complaining of the ever so slight movement, Eddie reached out and took his hand without hesitation.

“Don’t worry about that,” Richie advised him, his eyes flickering over to the broken pieces of plastic floating about in the shallow water. “You don’t need it. You’re stronger than that… You don’t need your pills either, you know,” he added after a moment, his gaze returning to meet with his friend’s.

What happened next was a blur for Eddie as his closest companion’s behaviour became even more erratic. Something stuck into his foot as he was shoved backwards (he probably just stepped on one of the pieces of what used to be his inhaler), his back crashing hard into the wall behind him. The pain in his arm escalated, immediately taking his attention away from the discomfort in his foot, but then another feeling attacked his senses.

Not pain or agony, or disgust or discomfort, but something… warm, something just as intense as the pain coursing through every fibre of his being but much more enjoyable. He didn’t understand at first. He wasn’t sure if even Richie did at the time. All he knew was that suddenly his best friend’s lips were on his, moving against them slowly, and he didn’t mind. Before he could even comprehend what he was doing, Eddie found himself kissing him back.

For a moment it seemed like nothing else mattered – not his broken arm or the monstrous clown that was still terrorising them, or even the question as to how the two of them had ended up there in the sewer when the last thing he could remember was feeling abandoned in the house on Niebolt Street.

But this sort of bliss and happiness, for Eddie Kaspbrak – as for all the losers – was never anything but short-lived and disappointing.

When Richie finally pulled away, his hands returning to his sides instead of Eddie’s, his hair had already begun turning orange and the smile on his suddenly cracked, pale face looked even more sadistic now than Eddie had imagined. In fact, he no longer looked like Richie at all, but It.

And all he found himself thinking was "I’ve just given my first kiss to a freaking demonic clown."


	2. Out of my Head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wanted Pennywise out of his head. But more importantly, he wanted Richie out of his head as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of this chapter follows Eddie and some of it follows Richie.  
> I can't relate to Richie as well as I do Eddie so I probably haven't written him as well, but I hope you like it anyway!

Why wasn’t he dead yet? Unless of course he was, and he’d just missed his entire murder in a massive fit of dissociation. Knowing him, that was perfectly possible, but knowing It, the monster responsible wouldn’t have wanted to let him get away with it that easily. It would have made him suffer, and suffer he did. For what felt like hours after his first kiss had been stolen away from him, he lay there in the sewer enduring panic attack after panic attack (unfortunately without the aid of his inhaler), the clown now having left him alone with his thoughts.

He hoped, in a way, that none of it was real. That it was just the worst nightmare imaginable, or even that he’d gone insane and was hallucinating everything. He would have done anything to convince himself it wasn’t really happening – that really, he was back at home with his friends, Pennywise didn’t exist and neither did his confusing thoughts about Richie.

And in a way, he wanted Richie to be there with him, to tell him everything was going to be okay – just like he had when he’d seen Pennywise attack him in the Niebolt House – and for them to get the hell out of there together, each of them defending one another if It attacked again. But perhaps this was for the best. If he stayed there alone, yes, he would probably die, but at least his friends would be protected (as long as Pennywise didn’t go after them once he’d killed Eddie) and he wouldn’t be in danger of dying from embarrassment at the thought of Richie finding out about his feelings toward him, whatever they really were.

Every time he dared think back to Pennywise’s cruel joke something seemed to snap inside his head and he momentarily became filled with rage and determination – the kind of determination that would have stayed with him longer had his friends been there – but then it quickly faded as his thoughts turned back to Richie, and how everything seemed to fall into place when his friend’s lips were on his. Well, Pennywise’s, actually. 

It wasn’t like he hadn’t realised long ago that he felt far closer to Richie than any of his other friends, but until an hour or so ago he’d never even contemplated kissing him (or anybody, for that matter). It made him question whether such feelings had been lying dormant within him for years, hidden just under the surface of his subconscious, allowing Pennywise to exploit them without him realising, or whether It had manipulated him into developing those feelings simply for the purpose of attacking his sanity.

He wanted Pennywise out of his head. But more importantly, he wanted Richie out of his head as well.

 

When Richie first entered the sewer, he had three of the other losers in tow, each of them following behind him in a dishevelled line. And yet when he turned around twenty minutes later, deep into the sewer by then and with his mind focused on only one thing, Bill, Mike and Beverly had all vanished into the dirty thin air – which was odd considering that he hadn’t stopped talking to them all in over fifteen minutes, though it did explain why nobody had told him to shut up (which they usually did within thirty seconds of him starting blabbering on). 

The initial shock panicked him, but he knew he needed to maintain his composure if he was going to have a chance at finding Eddie. It had lured him away from the group by using his closest friend once before, and it seemed he was going to have to let it happen again. Eddie had been stuck down there on his own for hours and if he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon. There was no time to waste – not even on searching for his other friends.

It felt as though the water levels were rising. It was only when he glanced down and shone his torch in the same direction for just a moment that he saw the strange reddish tint the water had to it. Grey water. He smiled to himself at the notion of Eddie being himself again, but his smile quickly faded because Eddie just wasn’t there. But his blood was.

It smelled metallic, like rust or blood or both. He hoped it was just rust, but naturally it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. The water was freaking red. 

His footsteps sped up.

Within moments what had once been silence became the splashing of water as he waded through it, and then something else could be heard from further down the long tunnel through which he was hastily staggering. Whimpers. Pained, distressed whimpers. He could picture it in his mind… his best friend laying there in the bloody water, too petrified to even move.

His swift staggering escalated into a rapid jog.

It was then, as he followed the bend of the blood-soaked tunnel, that his worst nightmare came to life right before his eyes. He was right. Eddie was lying drenched on the floor, though thankfully there wasn’t as much blood as his imagination had let on, and the soft, painful whimpers were indeed coming from him. His eyes were closed, his hair was messy and soaked in the rising water, his head propped up against the wall of the sewer, and every so often his body twitched slightly, his face scrunching up as if he was trying to block out the visions of a very bad dream.

Richie’s heart started to race at the sight of him. In a sudden – yet expected – eruption of horror, he raced forwards, throwing himself onto the floor beside his closest friend and anxiously shaking him by the shoulders, begging him to wake up. When he didn’t, his fear for his friend’s safety really started to set in.

Neither his pills nor his inhaler were anywhere to be found and every tremble he witnessed Eddie’s body perform reminded him of how little oxygen may have been getting to him. His nose and mouth were above the water but he’d seen his friend’s asthma attacks and panic attacks on numerous occasions and that seemed to be exactly what he was seeing now, only this time Eddie was unconscious.

He still managed to elicit an agonised hiss when Richie slid his arms underneath him, attempting to pick him up. It could have worked, had he been stronger, but Richie’s knees buckled and he almost dropped his friend back into the sewer’s bloody waves. Dragging him was out of the question and besides, now that his other friends had gone missing, he had no-one to check directions with and had no idea how to get out of the sewer. He had to act fast – for Eddie’s sake.

Whilst his friend remained unconscious, he laid him across his body, sitting down with his back against the wall, and attempted to clean up the gashes and open wounds on Eddie’s body – one on his cheek and a few on his arms. He gave up on that idea almost instantly, realising that the only water available was heavily contaminated and that Eddie would have killed him if he’d known what he was thinking about doing.

Luckily, the next time he tried to awaken him from his oblivion, he succeeded, though he had to cause his friend some unfortunate pain in the process.

But he was pretty sure it hurt him a lot more when Eddie immediately started screaming.

Shushing him by placing his hand over his mouth probably would have only made him scream more, so he saved himself the trouble and tried to soothe him by stroking his hair instead, simultaneously taking hold of Eddie’s hand and interlocking their fingers as he desperately hoped this would be enough to remind him that they were on the same side, no matter how often he teased him. “Eds, just… just shut up for a minute, okay? What the hell’s gotten into you?” He spoke softly, his voice barely above a whisper, and after a moment or so it seemed as though he’d finally gotten through to him. Eddie’s body was still shaking slightly but he had stopped screaming, which was progress.

“Sorry,” he muttered warily, half-heartedly pulling his hand away from Richie’s grip and standing up, moving to the other side of the narrow tunnel. It stung a bit when he noticed Richie’s face fall at his desire to create distance between them, but he had to be cautious. Trust had been his downfall last time and he wasn’t about to let it happen again. “I- It’s really you, Richie? Not some… not some fucking clown?” The suspicion was evident in his voice and for a brief couple of seconds Richie seemed to be laughing nervously at him, but his gaze radiated seriousness and concern. It was starting to get a lot harder not to trust him.

“Why would you think I was the clown?” Richie asked, bemused. His bewilderment appeared genuine but Pennywise had fooled him once before – and who knew how could an actor It could be?

Eddie simply shrugged and said nothing. For a while Richie said nothing back, but then eventually offered his hand to him and suggested they got away before the clown came back. After a moment’s hesitation, Eddie took his hand and allowed him to lead him back the way he’d come in, but he couldn’t help feeling like he was being fooled by It yet again. Sometimes he felt he was being watched and sometimes he felt he was holding hands with the devil. He just couldn’t decide which was true and which was not.


	3. Sweet Little Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once discharged from the hospital, Eddie was driven home – a word which in this case meant “a prison cell he hadn’t a hope in hell of escaping from.” Sometimes, the sewer was less of a prison than his mother.

He could still feel breathing against his cheek and fingers running through his hair, each motion even more soothing and gentler than the last. He squeezed his eyes shut, knowing he should have alerted his friends to his consciousness but being unwilling to let his reverie come to an end, and prayed no-one would notice his eyelids twitching. Nobody did, or at least they didn’t mention it. On the other hand, however, he knew his mother had already been called and was desperate for some time to speak alone with his friends before she showed up and took him back home, so in some ways it seemed better to let them know he was awake sooner rather than later.

But as he turned his head to the side and opened his eyes by the smallest of margins, he caught sight of Richie sitting in the chair by his bed, reaching out to take his hand in his. Their gazes met for a second before Eddie closed his eyes again. Richie said nothing, but tightened his grip on the smaller boy’s hand.

While he was aware it would have to end sometime – sometime soon, for that matter – he just wasn’t ready for his mother to come bursting through the heavy double doors at the entrance to the hospital ward, her sharp stare scattering the rest of his friends whilst Richie stayed by his side, though his grip slackened and he eventually let go of him completely – no doubt because of a furious glare he had earned from Eddie’s mother simply by daring to touch him.

Eddie was snatched away in an instant, his chest tightening at the realisation that he had lost all of his pills and his inhaler had been destroyed. His panic only intensified when his mother snapped at his friends at moment later, rage and possessiveness and utter disdain oozing from her voice as she swore she would never let her son anywhere near them again. She seemed to have particular contempt for Richie, who watched her drag his friend away with a heartbroken look on his face. Eddie had never seen him so forlorn.

Not that he had much of a chance to look at him then, what with his mother dragging him out into the hallway and telling him not to stare because he was never going to see them again anyway, since it was apparently their fault that his arm had ended up in a cast and that his clothes were soaked and bloody. His wounds must have been infected but he didn’t mention hat to her, afraid of how she would react if she knew he’d been lying in a sewer for hours.

But he also wondered how she would react if she knew that Richie was the one who’d saved him – although he still wasn’t entirely able to trust him, given what Pennywise had done to him earlier – and that his friends weren’t at all to blame for injuries, but a monster. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the thought. He couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t even see the goddamned clown, let alone believe that his friends weren’t the criminal monstrosities she seemed to think they were.

Once discharged from the hospital, Eddie was driven home – a word which in this case meant “a prison cell he hadn’t a hope in hell of escaping from.” Sometimes, the sewer was less of a prison than his mother.

What was possibly most disappointing was that he hadn’t heard either Mike, Beverly or Bill say a single word to Richie during the entire time since they’d gotten him out of the sewer. He knew they were mad at him – though about what he wasn’t quite sure – but Richie had apologised and he was pretty sure that was first time he’d heard him say the word “sorry”. 

Eddie was sorry. He was sorry that he was too afraid to tell his mother the truth, sorry that he’d put them in danger by getting trapped by It, by getting stuck in the sewer and having to be rescued, and he was sorry that he couldn’t even tell his best friend from the evil entity they were spending their summer trying to fight off. The least he could do, he decided, was make sure his mother knew that his smashed inhaler had nothing to do with his friends.

“Mom,” he started once they were back at home, his voice barely louder than a whisper; it got her attention anyway and she sat gazing up at him expectantly. “I uh… There’s something I need to tell you. My inhaler… While we were playing, I accidentally flung it and it um… It broke.” He spent the whole time staring at the floor, just waiting for the hurricane that was surely about to hit him. Yet the storm never came and when he finally looked up, he found her watching him intently, eyes narrowed.

“Are you sure this doesn’t have anything to do with your… friends?” Eddie simply nodded, assuring her that it didn’t. 

She didn’t look like she was about to let it go, so he quickly changed the subject to something else he’d been wondering about – and then instantly wanted to retract his words. “Just one more thing… Is it okay for a boy to want to kiss other boys? Just asking for a friend – nothing to do with me.” 

When a second later she hadn’t spoken, Eddie turned to leave and started hurriedly walking away, but she stood up and caught him by the arm (thankfully not the broken one) and pulled him backwards, forcing him to stay. “It’s that Richie isn’t it?” Those simple five words made his heart stop and his mind fill with dread. She knew. Somehow… she knew. “I always knew he was one of those… one of those faggots.” The word made him flinch, much less the way she spat it at him. “No, Eddie, it’s not okay. It’s sick! I have half a mind to tell that boy’s parents so they can punish him properly.”

The instant she stopped digging her nails into his arm and let him go, he scurried off to his room, feeling more broken and beaten down than ever because now it seemed like even his mother – his possessive, overbearing mother – didn’t even want him anymore. Well, she wouldn’t have if she’d known the truth.

And if she told Richie’s parents what she thought was going through their son’s head, Richie wouldn’t want him around anymore either – not if he realised he was the one who was really sick.

But he realised once he was safely locked away in his room that in his panic, he may have presented his question to his mother in a way that wasn’t completely how he’d intended to convey it. Perhaps he should have been completely honest with her – that he had never wanted to kiss anyone at all before but had recently been experiencing feelings for one person in particular. And in fact, he had never thought about kissing that person until it was already happening, so maybe he wasn’t as sick as he thought.

Dismissing that thought as mere wishful thinking, he climbed into bed even though he’d barely eaten a thing all day and pulled the blanket over his head, settling into a restless sleep.

Eddie was awoken several hours later (at precisely twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning) by a knocking at his window. For a moment, he really could have done with having a working inhaler, but then he caught sight of the figure outside of his bedroom window and realised who it was – if it was indeed who it appeared to be.

“Eds! Let me in! It’s freezing out here!” It certainly sounded like Richie. It looked like him, too. But was it him? Well, there was only one way to find out and if it really was him, Eddie wasn’t about to let him freeze to death outside.

And so, slipping out of bed, he cautiously approached the window, lifted it up and stepped back, watching Richie clamber inside. Once inside, his friend turned around for a moment to slam the window shut, the sudden noise striking fear into Eddie’s core – fear which Richie noticed immediately. “You don’t mind if I sleepover, do you?” he asked, slinging an arm around Eddie’s shoulders and guiding him towards the bed, where they sat on the edge side by side. “Hey, what’s going on?” He lowered his voice to a soft whisper, hugging the smaller boy closer when he saw that he’d started shaking.

Eddie shook his head without a word, instincts wanting him to melt into Richie’s embrace but his mind screaming at him not to trust him; in the end, it could have been It. His breath trembled but he stayed put, leaning in slightly to rest his head on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m just… scared. Something happened down there – in the sewer – and now I can’t… I can’t forget.”

Richie said nothing – a rare occasion which Eddie intended to celebrate later – and tilted his head to lean against his friend. “You don’t have to be scared, Eds. I’m here. You don’t think I’ll protect you? ‘Cause I’ll murder any fucking clown that tries to hurt you any day.” Eddie hadn’t had much to smile about in a while but this really was something that calmed him and he gave a small, contented smile as he thought to himself how that was such a Richie thing to say – not like Pennywise at all.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, his voice muffled by the soft skin of Richie’s neck as he turned his head, pressing his face against him. “But,” he started after a moment or two of serene silence, lifting his head up to look Richie in the eye. “What are you doing here? Won’t your parents be mad? And anyway, mom says I’m not allowed to see you anymore.”

“I doubt they’ll even notice I’m gone. And as for your mom… we’ll just have to keep quiet, won’t we? I mean, as long as she doesn’t come in here and catch me, I’ll be fine.”

“Right,” Eddie nodded with a smile.

With the soothing warmth radiating from Richie’s body beside him, sleep came easily to him and for the first time since Pennywise had first begun terrorising him and his friends, his dreams were nightmare-less and full of the sweet little things he loved about Richie.


	4. The Bracelets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie heard him say he was sorry for the second time in twelve hours.

The tatty, fraying black and yellow threads of his much-loved bracelet were in his dreams that night. He couldn’t remember where he had gotten it from but he’d always thought it must have been a gift to him from some distant relative who knew nothing about him but his name, that being the only thing on the vibrantly-coloured bracelet – or at least, it once had been, but by now most of the letters had gone missing, with only I and E surviving. But within his dreams, the lack of letters was insignificant.

What was significant was the way in which those black and yellow threads wound themselves tightly around Eddie’s left wrist, crossed the room to where Richie was standing, and wound themselves around his wrist too, essentially binding them together. The two of them spent the entire duration of Eddie’s dream connected not only by the threads, but more often than not by holding each other’s hands as well. Even when Eddie awoke after roughly five hours of sleeping the tingling feeling in his left hand refused to leave him, his thoughts of Richie doing the same.

Turning his head to the side, he found his friend still lying beside him, eyes closed with a peaceful look on his face. He was the pure embodiment of tranquillity, and it wasn’t often he could say something like that about Richie Tozier. It was all too tempting to brush the hair away from his eyes and gently kiss his forehead but he managed to fight off the compulsion by forcing himself to remember how he’d felt when he’d discovered that the person he’d given his first kiss to was not his best friend as he’d thought, but the nightmarish monster that would happily psychologically torture him before killing him.

But the real Richie wasn’t a thing like Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The real Richie was sweet, attractive and insanely irritating, yet still funny and entertaining. And if he suddenly became less irritating, Eddie was pretty sure that nothing would feel right anymore. He was far too loud and never knew when to shut up, but a quieter Richie would have been worrying. They were constantly bickering (which resulted in frequent comparisons between them and old married couples) but they both secretly enjoyed their petty little arguments and Eddie wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He was still thinking about all of this when Richie’s eyes fluttered open. He sat up and stretched, yawning, until his mouth curved up into a grin. Then, reaching over to the nearest nightstand to grab his glasses, he mentioned the one thing Eddie had hoped he hadn’t noticed. “You were staring at me.” His voice was serious but his grin remained on his face and he was blushing slightly, but nowhere near as much as Eddie was.

“Shut up,” Eddie hissed playfully, laughing as he picked up his pillow and hit him in the chest with it. “I just happened to look at you for a second, that’s all.”

“Yeah, right,” Richie muttered, rolling his eyes at him. After a moment, he rolled out of the bed, stretched his legs and said, “So what’s for breakfast?”

Eddie shrugged. He didn’t feel like eating and he couldn’t risk Richie getting caught by letting him wander into the kitchen on his own, so he suggested that he’d go and get something for him. His mother wasn’t up yet so he managed to sneak past her room, grab and bagel and a glass of juice from the kitchen, and quietly return to his bedroom where Richie was waiting for him without a problem.

Richie must have been hungry because he wolfed down the bagel within seconds and then looked up at him expectantly, as if he was asking for more. Eddie just scowled at him and handed him the glass of juice, encouraging him to drink it. After taking a single sip – during which Richie’s face screwed itself up into the perfect image of disgust – he spat it back out into the glass and thrust it into Eddie’s grasp. “It’s got pulp in it. I hate pulp.”

“But it’s good for you,” Eddie immediately explained, like he didn’t already know it. He just found it hard to believe that anyone would refuse something that could make them healthier, even if they didn’t necessary like it. He didn’t particularly enjoy having to take pills all the time, but they were good for him and without them he’d be even more fragile and delicate than he was when he was taking them. That – and his mother’s insistence – was why he did it.

“Then you drink it,” Richie retorted teasingly, knowing damn well that he wouldn’t – even if he hadn’t spat the juice back into the glass, Eddie still wasn’t exactly a fan of sharing food and drink even without the added touch of a mouthful of saliva. He teased him even more when Eddie looked down at the glass for a second and then almost threw up at the thought of it, adding “If that’s what you’re like about sharing a drink, then what the hell are you gonna do when I stick my tongue down your throat?” to his taunts, but it instantly became apparent that he’d gone too far because suddenly the glass had slipped from his friend’s grip and had crashed onto the floor and so had his friend, juice and glass had gone everywhere and Eddie was hyperventilating, his inhaler smashed into smithereens in the sewer so no use to anyone.

He told him he was just joking, that he wasn’t really going to do anything like it. Eddie heard him say he was sorry for the second time in twelve hours. He was on a roll. He wrapped his arms around him, begging him to breathe and rubbing his back without even caring when the shards of glass sliced at his legs as he kneeled in front of him. When Eddie seemed to be calming down, Richie yanked the blanket off the bed and flung it around his friend’s shoulders before turning away to make an attempt at cleaning up the glass with his bare hands.

But when Eddie’s condition deteriorated, he whipped round again, jumped to his feet and started in the direction of the door, telling him he was going to get his mother. He had just reached the bedroom door when a hand snatched at his ankle and Eddie practically yelled at him not to go. “You’ll…” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Get in trouble,” he finished, the panic still very much alive in his voice. “I’ll be fine. Just… give me a minute.” Richie nodded hesitantly and came away from the door, sitting back down on the floor beside his friend. “I had my first kiss yesterday,” Eddie explained to him quietly once he’d calmed himself down (with Richie’s aid, naturally). He kept his gaze trained on the carpeted floor, afraid to look his friend in the eye and directly witness his reaction.

“Wow, that bad, huh?” Richie joked, though he was half-serious about believing his friend had been traumatised by his first kiss.

“Well, the kiss itself wasn’t bad,” Eddie went on, his cheeks turning a bright shade of pink. “It’s just…” He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and took a long, deep breath, preparing to tell his friend what had happened. “I kissed the fucking clown.” It came out as a sort of whispered screech and he could tell Richie had to do a double take, pausing for a minute to comprehend what he had just heard him say.

“Did you just say you kissed the clown? The fucking clown?” His eyes were wide in astonishment and Eddie could tell he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or throw up. “Well, I’m sort of impressed,” Richie eventually admitted, nonchalantly leaning his back against the wall next to the bed. “So it was good, right? – you said it wasn’t bad – but what’s… Why? Why did you kiss It?”

“Because I thought it was you!” 

He yelled it a little too loudly and for a short while there was only tense silence enveloping them, until his mother’s footsteps began thundering towards his room and she was calling out for him, asking what all the noise was. Temporarily forgetting the tense moment that had just occurred, Eddie hissed at his friend to hide and Richie promptly threw himself under the bed, the blanket falling down enough to cover his view of the door just in time before Eddie’s mother burst in, demanding to know who her son was talking to.  
Eddie didn’t like lying at the best of times and lying to his mother was always going to be worse, but he had to for Richie’s sake (as well as his own, because it while Richie would have gotten the brunt of any ferocious hostility, he probably wouldn’t get away without at least taking some of it; he had been the one to let his friend into the house against his mother’s instruction, after all). So he told her, rather unimaginatively, that he’d been talking to himself. She narrowed her eyes and looked at him curiously, silently asking for an elaboration, to which he hastily replied that he’d been practising speaking in front of the mirror to try and improve his confidence.

She seemed to buy into his deception and nodded, reminding him to eat breakfast and clean up the mess before walking away and gently shutting the door behind her, but it was only after she left that Eddie realised he didn’t even have a mirror in his bedroom.

He held his breath, expecting her to realise it too and return angry at his lie, and waited for several minutes before signally to the boy underneath his bed that it was safe for him to come out.

Richie crawled out from beneath the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at his friend as the uncomfortable tension creeped up on them both. Eddie stared back, biting his lower lip.

Then, without uttering a single word, Richie took something out of his pocket and leaned across the floor, sliding it over to him. “This yours?” he asked casually, ignoring the tension returning from their earlier conversation. “I’ve had it for years and almost forgot I even had it. Mine went missing a long time ago and I found this one instead. It’s similar but…”

Unbeknownst to Eddie, his friend was still droning on, a monotonous sound of static in the background of Eddie’s mind as he gazed down at the object Richie was suggesting belonged to him. It was a bracelet made with blue and crimson threads, a series of beads hanging in the middle of it, each with its own letter imprinted on it, spelling out the name Eddie.

Nodding, he stuffed it into his pocket and headed into the kitchen for a brush he could sweep the broken glass up with. Richie watched him from the doorway, his gaze trained on Eddie’s light movements and with a smile on his face.


	5. Rainy Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie was evidently surprised to be hearing from him but he quickly resorted to his old, cocky self, remarking that he was shocked Eddie had managed to keep away from him for so long. “Just come over,” Eddie growled, almost regretting his decision to call. “Mom’s gonna be out for a couple of hours. Get here soon, okay? We don’t have that long.”

Several days passed – cold, rainy days, as if the sky had forgotten that it was the middle of summer – and Eddie spoke to none of his friends, staying inside the entire time under the watchful gaze of his controlling mother. Ever since she realised a little too late that her son had lied to her – that there was no mirror in his bedroom so he couldn’t have been speaking to his reflection – she had become so suspicious of him that she refused to let him out of her sight. 

Eddie quickly became resigned to this fact but was unable to enjoy his time while he was stuck inside on his own. Only his friends could make him feel better and although Richie tried on one occasion to convince Mrs Kaspbrak to let him in, his efforts were wasted and seeing him without being able to talk to him was torture for Eddie, so Richie eventually left without causing too much of a scene to end his friend’s suffering.

They needed to talk. He may not have wanted to, but Eddie knew that some things needed to be said about his outburst a few days earlier – like lie about his feelings, cover everything up until Richie hopefully told him he felt the exact same way, or tell him how he really felt. He didn’t think he’d be able to bring himself to do either. He couldn’t lie to his best friend, but he couldn’t face the humiliation of admitting he would often lie awake at night thinking about him, that spending time with him made it harder to breathe than any asthma attack ever could and that he was the only person he’d ever felt like loving.

Except he didn’t think he was in love. There was no lust in his feelings toward Richie either – or anyone, for that matter. Maybe he was just… falling, in slow-motion, each day bringing him closer and closer to the ground. Like he was floating.

His eyes snapped open, the sudden recognition of that word bringing back memories he’d been unsuccessfully trying to forget. Of course, It was still out there, each night a dreadful reminder of that fact, but without his friends there was nothing he could do to combat it and he knew there was no point in worrying, as the short naps he managed to steal during the day were the only times he was able to get any rest and he couldn’t afford to lose them to stress. The new inhaler his mother had gotten for him was helping, as were the sleeping tablets she’d somehow convinced the doctor to prescribe him (even though he hadn’t been losing sleep for very long), but it wasn’t going to get much better until It was gone for good.

He caught his mother staring at him strangely as he put his inhaler into his mouth and breathed into it frantically, Pennywise’s taunts haunting him from within his mind. You don’t need it. You don’t need your pills either. Of course he needed them. Why else would he have been prescribed them? Why else would his mother be making him take them?

A moment later, his mother gave him the news he’d been waiting days to hear.

She was going out. She’d be out for two hours and he was apparently going to have to stay home in case he got a cold from being out in the rain. She clearly didn’t want to leave him alone for so long but she didn’t have a choice. As she left, Eddie feigned disappointment but was secretly more relieved and more delighted than he had been in a long time. Five minutes after she left, he darted to the phone and dialled Richie’s number, which he knew instinctively.

Richie was evidently surprised to be hearing from him but he quickly resorted to his old, cocky self, remarking that he was shocked Eddie had managed to keep away from him for so long. “Just come over,” Eddie growled, almost regretting his decision to call. “Mom’s gonna be out for a couple of hours. Get here soon, okay? We don’t have that long.” The phone went dead immediately, his friend on the other end not even bothering to confirm that he’d be there for dashing out the front door, grabbing his bike and setting off down the road.

There was a knock at the door in under five minutes, Eddie’s heart practically leaping out of his chest when he heard the sudden noise – half in excitement, half in fear that his mother had changed her mind and that was her… but why would she knock? (unless she’d forgotten her key, in which case his fear was perfectly rational).

“Can we talk?” Eddie asked quietly once he and Richie had greeted each other at the door – Eddie rather skittishly, paranoid that his mother would somehow be watching – and were sitting side by side on the sofa, a little too closely for comfort. 

“About what?” Richie replied as he adjusted his glasses, eyeing his friend with a knowing smirk.

Averting his gaze, Eddie shuffled away nervously, only to have a hand on his face suddenly pull his head in the other direction, forcing him to meet his friend’s gaze. Biting his lip, he almost closed his eyes but then instantly realised it might look like he was expecting Richie to kiss him and changed his mind. Richie, on the other hand, apparently had other ideas. He shook his head and for a moment, Eddie felt only confusion, but then he said, “We don’t need to talk.”

And then his mouth was pushing against Eddie’s, the smaller boy’s hands automatically entangling his fingers in Richie’s soft dark hair. His eyes closed on impact and his heart started to race, but in the best way possible. Suddenly ever fear, every anxiety he had ever held melted away into nothingness and he let himself relax slowly, allowing Richie to guide him. A hand on his chest gently pushed him down and he fell backwards without a second thought, his arms still wrapped around the older boy’s neck, keeping him close.

When Richie eventually pulled away for air, Eddie was silently relieved as this gave him a chance to snatch his inhaler out of his pocket and breathe into it desperately, frantically trying to calm his frenzied heart. It worked for one thing, helping to catch his breath back, but did nothing to calm his beating heart. He supposed that was just Richie’s effect on him. He decided he was starting to like it.

Without a word, Richie attacked his lips again and once again Eddie let it carry him away. But then he was lying on his back, the older boy leaning against him, biting at his lower lip and it all felt too much. It was too much, too soon and while he was still enjoying it physically, Eddie was starting to panic. So he suddenly stopped moving his lips and put a hand on Richie’s chest, giving him a half-hearted shove. Richie stopped in an instant, taking the hint and moving away to the other side of the small sofa, giving him the space he clearly needed.

Unable to breathe properly, Eddie shook his head, silently telling him to stop until he managed to steady his breathing. “I… I mean, I like it, I just…” He tried to justify his actions, noticing the hurt look in his friend’ eyes, but he didn’t really know how to explain the way he felt. He did like it. It felt good, but he just didn’t want to go any further, and he didn’t think he ever would. But that was hard to explain so he just apologised and moved closer to his friend, putting an arm around him but refusing to speak of the kiss anymore.


End file.
